A
question many people think that will leave Harry Potter fans speechless
is "Why wasn't the Time Turner used to go back in the past and solve all the
problems beforehand in stead of all this bloody struggle?"
Well here's
why. When someone goes to the past and tries to change it, there's no
telling what would actually happen(well duh, no one's managed to try it
yet). So all we can do is formulate theories about what will happen.
Often logical paradoxes are created because of these theories. For
example, consider the very famous question "What will happen if you go
to the past and kill your grandpa before your father was born? You
wouldn't exist then, and if you didn't exist who'd be the one going back
and killing your grandpa? And if no one goes back to kill your grandpa,
would you exist? And then what would happen and so on...". First of
all, how twisted a mind someone would need to think to themselves "Hey
what would happen if I tried to erase myself from existence?" is beyond
me. Secondly, why is it always the grandpa? Maybe because killing your
grandpa sounds less evil than patricide/matricide? I dunno, maybe.
Now if you indeed lived in this world and were so inexorably stupid,
what would happen? Well in this world, it seems that JK Rowling treated
all paradoxes with the theory that "you can't change the past". Whoa!
What? "I'm going to the past to cause anarchy, didn't you hear? How will
that not change anything?" Well yeah I did hear you, loud and clear,
and I'm telling you that you couldn't. You could go to the past, but
that wouldn't change anything. That is any wreckage you hope of causing,
trust me when I say this, that has already happened. You're adding
nothing to history. You just didn't have knowledge of that yourself.
Your grandfather wouldn't know that the guy trying to kill him was his
grandson-to-be, but you would essentially fail. If your grandfather
didn't die in 1960, it means you CANNOT go back to 1960 and kill him.
You could cause him major inconvenience though but that would not stop
him and ol' grandma from giving birth to your father, who in turn would
give birth to the douche that you are.
Okay, now let's consider
an actual test case from JK Rowling. The first major incident. The one
where Harry and Hermione save Buckbeak. Now obviously, they thought that
Buckbeak had been killed, but Dumbledore, who was the one to send them
in the chase, obviously knew different. He knew that Buckbeak had not
been killed and that is exactly why he said "If all goes well, you'd be
saving more than one life today". It's like that everywhere in this
world. You could never go back and change something that has happened
beyond any doubt.
And this is exactly why no one wasted their
time trying to change what they know they can't. It's not some huge plot
loophole. And no, haters haven't got a major win against the
PotterHeads.
An afterthought: I remember Hermione saying in
PoA that Professor McG once told her, many wizards have accidentally
killed their past or future self. Well to this I say, killing your
future self is a perfectly possible case. Killing your past? In JKR's
world? Not so much. I'm quite sure McGonagall said that just to scare
off Hermione from overusing the thing.
PS I spent time on writing this with an empty stomach and with lots to do. Why? One, I wanted
to and two, a meme saying "Why wasn't the time turner used and bla
bla..." pissed me off.
PPS And I hope to write all this, again, in Bangla. I hope.
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